Attitudes Toward Atheists & Beliefs About Atheists

The above actually referred to a pagan practice of boiling lamb in milk & sprinkling it over land to make it more fertile.

Click to expand...

That would make it at least somewhat relevant to religious practice and by extension, to those who don't believe.
But Musika came along way late in the thread and started in on all regulation of animal-source food products, and seemed to be pushing the line that religious dietary laws, more effectively than the FDA standards, limit the slaughter and consumption of domestic livestock.
Since he persists in this confusion in spite of several attempts to straighten him out, I can only conclude that it's not confusion but deliberate obfuscation, to deflect the topic.

It came up along the way; the inquiry it responds to is found in #143↑, and has to do with whether old religious rules are still practiced or a "bygone tradition", per the question quoted in #153↑. As Jeeves↑, notes, it seems some manner of obfuscation, so the answer is that it hasn't much to do with attitudes and beliefs about atheists despite being postured as a response to a comparative inquiry posted last year.

Mark 16:15
15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.

Do any theists preach to animals?
I have asked many & they never answer.

Click to expand...

We might notice the particular transition from Christianity (Mk. 16.15) to theism ("theists").

Is it fair to require a Muslim to answer for whatever Christian that question would purport to regard? The thing is, even within Christendom, sectarian projection is complicated and unwieldy; it is, however, slightly easier to ask Southern Baptists to answer for Catholicism than vice versa, but only because of particular historical-axiomatic nexes, including the one being a later response to the other.

Or this: What is the propriety of asking a Quaker to answer for SBC, and we might note the question why, in this juxtaposition, stands out especially? (Hint: The first part is straightforward, that barring extraordinary circumstance, it is not proper. The second part, about why, is not nearly so obscure as it might seem.)

At any rate, I raise these examples for a reason.

Look, atheism is as atheism is. In this case, there aren't as many formal boundaries separating atheists, but that's the thing, none of them have anything to do with each other, even when pushing the same tired talking points we've all heard for years.

Or, more realistically, yeah, it's true we all see some weird stuff rolling through here, these days, and since some atheists are really, really sensitive about this sort of stuff, it seems worth taking the moment to assure them explicitly that no, the recent arrival and behavior of extraordinarily terrible, ostensibly atheistic representation reading more like ill-considered Poe-farce provocateurism, will not be held against atheists generally.

(RNS) — It happens a lot after famous nonbelievers die: People claim the nonbeliever had a deathbed conversion to Christianity.
And it happened again after the death last week of physicist Stephen Hawking, who, by his own account, did not believe in God.
“We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God,” Hawking said in 2011. “No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.”Catholics Online from claiming that Hawking uttered “I believe” in his mechanical voice after a meeting with Pope Francis just before his death.
They even posted a picture to “prove” it.
Trouble is, it isn’t true. The investigative site Snopes called the claim and its source “disreputable” before slapping the story with its bright red “FALSE” sticker.

“This Facebook post is just another in a litany of fabricated claims about famous non-believers,” the Snopes crew writes. “The source is a Facebook page associated with the disreputable website FrancisMary.org, which appears to have no formal affiliation with the Catholic church and routinely posts clickbait articles touting videos of Jesus Christ appearing in the flesh during a church service, or as an angel on a white horse fighting in Israel.”
The photograph itself was not doctored, Snopes ruled. But the pontiff and the physicist met at the Vatican in November 2016 for a scheduled meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which Hawking was a longtime and valued member. The academy has no belief requirements for members.Carl Sagan, Dutch soccer star Johan Cruyff and writer Christopher Hitchens were all the subjects of supposed deathbed conversions to belief in a Christian God.
The most recent example came from Larry Alex Taunton, a Christian apologist, who knew Hitchens and wrote a book titled “The Faith of Christopher Hitchens” a year after Hitchens’ death in 2010.

In it, Taunton claimed Hitchens was “teetering on the edge of belief” shortly before he died of esophageal cancer, too famous for his outspoken atheism to admit he was privately “entering forbidden territory, crossing enemy lines, exploring what he had ignored or misrepresented for so long.”
“At the end of his life, Christopher’s searches had brought him willingly, if secretly, to the altar,” Taunton writes at the end of the book. “Precisely what he did there, no one knows.”
Exactly, Taunton’s critics responded (along with a few other choice words like “petty” and “disgusting”). No knows what happens in the hearts of people at the moment of their deaths. But in the case of Hawking, Snopes points out that there was zero evidence to indicate he had embraced a belief in God.
And no secret conversion should be read in the news that Hawking’s ashes will be laid in Westminster Abbey this fall, an honor for eminent Britons. Darwin rests there, too.

(RNS) — It happens a lot after famous nonbelievers die: People claim the nonbeliever had a deathbed conversion to Christianity.
And it happened again after the death last week of physicist Stephen Hawking, who, by his own account, did not believe in God.
“We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God,” Hawking said in 2011. “No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.”Catholics Online from claiming that Hawking uttered “I believe” in his mechanical voice after a meeting with Pope Francis just before his death.
They even posted a picture to “prove” it.
Trouble is, it isn’t true. The investigative site Snopes called the claim and its source “disreputable” before slapping the story with its bright red “FALSE” sticker.

“This Facebook post is just another in a litany of fabricated claims about famous non-believers,” the Snopes crew writes. “The source is a Facebook page associated with the disreputable website FrancisMary.org, which appears to have no formal affiliation with the Catholic church and routinely posts clickbait articles touting videos of Jesus Christ appearing in the flesh during a church service, or as an angel on a white horse fighting in Israel.”
The photograph itself was not doctored, Snopes ruled. But the pontiff and the physicist met at the Vatican in November 2016 for a scheduled meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which Hawking was a longtime and valued member. The academy has no belief requirements for members.Carl Sagan, Dutch soccer star Johan Cruyff and writer Christopher Hitchens were all the subjects of supposed deathbed conversions to belief in a Christian God.
The most recent example came from Larry Alex Taunton, a Christian apologist, who knew Hitchens and wrote a book titled “The Faith of Christopher Hitchens” a year after Hitchens’ death in 2010.

In it, Taunton claimed Hitchens was “teetering on the edge of belief” shortly before he died of esophageal cancer, too famous for his outspoken atheism to admit he was privately “entering forbidden territory, crossing enemy lines, exploring what he had ignored or misrepresented for so long.”
“At the end of his life, Christopher’s searches had brought him willingly, if secretly, to the altar,” Taunton writes at the end of the book. “Precisely what he did there, no one knows.”
Exactly, Taunton’s critics responded (along with a few other choice words like “petty” and “disgusting”). No knows what happens in the hearts of people at the moment of their deaths. But in the case of Hawking, Snopes points out that there was zero evidence to indicate he had embraced a belief in God.
And no secret conversion should be read in the news that Hawking’s ashes will be laid in Westminster Abbey this fall, an honor for eminent Britons. Darwin rests there, too.